Artwork

I have been working on a project that will include photography. (More on that project at a later date.)

At first, I thought that I would work with a photographer, but was encouraged to take the photos myself. As I acclimated to the idea, I thought that it would be good to exercise my image making, partly by taking more photos just using my phone, focusing on composition, light, etc. I set myself the task of taking at least three photos each day. (That got cut way down.)

Some days I did not want to go outside, so I took photos around the house and out the window. This turned into a kind of study. The nondescript, simple geometry of my neighbors’ houses grew more and more interesting to me: how the sky looked against them, how the light hit in early morning, midday, and evening.

I loaded the photographs that I fancied and wanted to keep, into photo/graphics editing software for a bit of touch up. No matter what the manufacturer of my phone claims, my phone camera does not take awesome photographs. Even with adjusting exposure, aperture, and so on, my phone camera takes good-ish snapshots. (To be fair, I have dropped my phone too many times…)

As I worked with the photos, improving sharpness, cropping, and the like, I started playing with the images, sometimes straying from preserving the scene that I had seen, treating the photos as a base for digital artwork. I have worked with graphic software many times before, but mainly to create images or graphics from an original idea. This using a photo as a base, though in no way new to anyone living in the 21^st century, was (and continues to be) a satisfying exploration.

Joy, June 26, 2026